The Test
For the testing, we used the same systems as were used for the GeForce 2 GTS review, with updated drivers. In the case of the Radeon, we tested with the shipping drivers with V-sync disabled as well as "Convert 32-bit textures to 16-bit" turned off. Below is the testing section from the GeForce 2 GTS review.
We chose three systems to measure the performance of these video cards. Remember that this is a comparison of the performance of video cards, not of CPUs or motherboard platforms.
For our High End testing platform, we picked an Athlon 750 running on a KX133 motherboard. The Athlon 750 is fast enough that it won’t be a limiting factor in the benchmarks and should also provide a good estimate of how all of the cards compared would perform on a 600 – 800MHz Athlon or Pentium III system (it will at least tell you which card would be faster).
For our Low End testing platform we picked a Pentium III 550E running on a BX motherboard. Although this isn’t a very “low-end” processor, it is fast enough to see a performance difference between video cards without the processor stepping in as a huge limitation. If we used something like a Celeron 466, the performance of virtually all the cards would be virtually identical at the lower resolutions because the CPU and FSB/memory buses are limiting factors. Once again, this is a test of graphics cards not of CPU/platform performance.
For our FSAA testing, we picked a 1GHz Pentium III running on an i820 motherboard with RDRAM. The reason we picked this platform (we are aware that it isn’t widely available) is because it eliminates virtually all bottlenecks that would be present and allows us to illustrate the biggest performance hit enabling FSAA would result in. Slower setups would have lesser performance hits because they have more bottlenecks.
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Windows 98 SE Test System |
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Hardware |
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CPU(s) |
Intel Pentium III 1.0EB
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Intel Pentium III 550E |
AMD Athlon 750
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| Motherboard(s) |
AOpen
AX6C
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AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold | AOpen AK72 | |||
| Memory |
128MB
PC800 Samsung RDRAM
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128MB PC133 Corsair SDRAM |
128MB
PC133 Corsair SDRAM
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| Hard Drive |
IBM Deskstar DPTA-372050 20.5GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA 66 |
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| CDROM |
Phillips 48X |
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| Video Card(s) |
3dfx
Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB ATI
Radeon 64MB DDR ATI Rage Fury MAXX 64MB Matrox Millennium G400MAX 32MB (would not run on Athlon platform) NVIDIA
GeForce 2 MX 32MB SDR (default clock 175/166) S3 Diamond Viper II 32MB |
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| Ethernet |
Linksys LNE100TX 100Mbit PCI Ethernet Adapter |
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Software |
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Operating System |
Windows 98 SE |
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| Video Drivers |
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Benchmarking Applications |
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| Gaming |
GT
Interactive Unreal Tournament 4.04 AnandTech.dem |
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2 Comments
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Thatguy97 - Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - link
ahh i remember anadtechs jihad against atiwow im dating myself
Frumious1 - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
I don't remember it at all. The only thing I recall is a bunch of whiny ass fanboys complaining when their chosen CPU, GPU, etc. didn't get massive amounts of acclaim. The very first Radeon cards were good, but they weren't necessarily superior to the competition. You want a good Radeon release, that would be the 9700 Pro and later 9800 Pro -- those beat Nvidia hands down, and AnandTech said as much.